Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
With the development of English language teaching, more and more teacherspaid attention to communicative language teaching and made efforts to encourageEnglish classroom interaction. It is believed that English teaching process is acommunicative process, in which both teachers and students should involvethemselves in classroom activities and exchange information. However, most ofChinese college students are in the habit of keeping silent in English classroom.Their silence discourages the teachers and hampers the effective communicationbetween the teachers and the students. Besides, it restricts the development ofstudents’ oral English and communicative competence. Consequently, students’classroom silence becomes one of the biggest headaches in English teaching, and itbegins to attract much attention from many researchers.Numerous studies have been conducted on students’ silence in classroom athome and abroad. Studies abroad are mainly about Japanese students’ classroomsilence and the reasons of students’ silence (Gimenez, 1989; Ferris and Tagg, 1996;Turner and Hiraga, 1996; Jaworski and Sachdev, 1998; Fredericksen, 2017; Petress,2017; Nakane, 2017; Harumi, 2017). Turner and Hiraga (1996) found that Japanesestudents in Britain were silent and unwilling to take part in dialectic and analyticdiscourse. They ascribed Japanese students’ silence to their culture. Jaworski andSachdev (1998) made a study on students’ classroom silence from the perspective ofdomination and power. They asserted that power relations in educational settingscould be constructed and reproduced through silence. Fredericksen (2017) claimedthat schoolgirls might become timid in a culture which seemed to have been createdfor boys. She concluded several reasons for silence in schoolgirls and othermarginalized students.
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1.2 Purposes and Significance of the Research
This research aims to investigate to what extent college students remain silentand figure out the most influential and related causes of students silence in Englishclassroom by means of questionnaire, interview and classroom observation. At thesame time, this research also tries to examine whether there are any significantdifferences in college students’ classroom silence between high proficiency levelstudents and low proficiency level students. 128 sophomores in Jiangxi NormalUniversity are surveyed on their learning motivation, self-evaluation of their oralEnglish proficiency, their feelings about English learning, their opinions aboutteachers’ teaching patterns and expectations. Interviews are conducted with 8students and 4 teachers as the interviewees. In addition, 35 of the 128 subjects areselected as high proficiency and other 35 are regarded as low proficiency. Theresearcher makes a contrast between high proficiency level students and lowproficiency level students in order to see if there are significant differences instudents’ classroom silence.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Definitions of Silence
Definitions of silence vary greatly depending on the theoretical frameworks andmethodologies for its study. Within linguistics, silence had traditionally beendefined as boundary-mark, “delimiting the beginning and end of utteran，英语毕业论文，英语毕业论文
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